Find the best rental room for you!

oakhouse.jp has currently renewed and renovated its website.
We are also launching out portal site where foreigners and Japanese alike can find share houses and apartments.

Have you lived in a room you can really use up until now?
Is it possible to find an easier and cheaper room to rent?
We thought about this long and hard.

Roadblocks foreigners find when renting, like key money, guarantors…
Expensive initial fees or rent that limit your options…
Difficult contracts or contract periods that limit your freedom…

It has been difficult to look for a place to rent up until now, and young people especially find it stressful.

Looking back on the history of the share house, 20 years ago they were known as “gaijin houses” for foreigners.
They were often the only places foreigners could find to live easily when they came to visit Japan.

They became known as places where communication flowed easily in a naturally formed community, acting as a hub to exchange information.

Not only popular with backpackers, they became popular with returning Japanese people who had been living and working overseas.
After first popping up in Thailand, these ‘guest houses’ spread to southeast Asia and Europe as places for foreigners to stay.

This logical system that requires no key money or guarantors gained many users after finding out about them in free papers, and management companies began handling more and more of these houses according to peoples’ needs.

The term ‘share house’ grew more popular in May of 2004.
‘Guest house’ had come to have a sort of stiff feeling, and the keyword ‘share’ became to resonate more with people, and over time began to become more naturally known as ‘share houses’.

Currently, there are many different houses and many different residents living in these houses.
It is said that there are between 25 to 30 thousand guest houses throughout Japan, with that number growing every year.
But they still account for only a fraction of the total Japanese rental market.

Once the media caught wind of the trend, it has spread throughout Japan, being seen as a ‘counter-market’ to the traditional rental market.

The mission of oakhouse.jp is to spread this lifestyle throughout Japan.

Houses with different concepts

Newly-built share houses

Guest houses with nostalgic moods

As well as rental apartments.。

On this portal site, many different management companies throughout Japan list their unique houses, responding to the housing needs of both Japanese people and foreigners.

Search for rooms you can really use

oakhouse.jp supports this new Japanese style of living.

December 2014 oakhouse.jp development team